Hazily, now

We spent the night think­ing about ways to com­mu­nic­ate in this fear­some city. We wondered why our voices couldn’t be heard even though we shouted daily to high heaven, deep­est hell and every level in between. We hammered at the doors and used any tools that life offered us to carve words of hatred, ignor­ance and dis­il­lu­sion­ment in the stone walls. We tried rip­ping down the bill posters to see if they would reveal a secret beneath their torn edges, but all they hid were more posters and lay­ers of hard, con­gealed glue.

Hav­ing resolved that the city wasn’t hid­ing any­thing except vast num­bers of people — more people than our minds could ever com­pre­hend, all closeted away in their indi­vidual plas­ter­board boxes where they could end­lessly muse over the lives of their favour­ite celebrit­ies — we spent the rest of the night carous­ing under the moon­light, listen­ing to the siren songs of the burg­lar alarms and smash­ing the empty wine bottles. We only ceased when dawn broke over the TV aerials.

At least, that’s how I remem­ber it. You tell it dif­fer­ently, but then you were always the poetic one, weren’t you?